Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Energy crisis solved!
There is a casual claim in last week's TLS (a propos of a review of book about how we got to the moon), that a single shuttle load of some moon gear called helium-3 could supply the US energy needs for a year. On initial investigation, it seems that there have been sci-fi films on this very topic. By way of further investigation, ask Mr G. and he knows all about the whole business. So I plump for http://www.technologyreview.com/ which says it is published by MIT and so ought to be respectable. Assuming that it is not some arms-length or off-shore media operation which simply pays MIT to use the name. Can't be bothered to check up on that just now.
Anyway, on the basis that it is respectable, I find some interesting stuff. If mining the moon were to become interesting, we would be likely to have four players: the US, Russia, India and China. Would we manage to come to some sort of arrangement for shared access? Could the US bear not to be the only player? Our record on such things in the last few hundred years not too inspiring. Plus, sadly, it seems to be a fairly big if. One needs a fusion reactor to burn helium-3. Now we do have such things, coming in various shapes and sizes, but most of them do not burn helium-3, despite the various theoretical advantages of same. We look to be some way off - decades - being able to show a profit on these things.
I am reminded of once reading about how much legal people loathe expert advisors. It seems that the legal view is that experts never agree among themselves, are always changing their minds and are generally a apain in the backside. Bit like geeks. Although you might think that this would be a useful generator of barrister chargeable hours. Maybe the legal people in question are the judges rather than the barristers; the people who want to get the right decision, quick and on the cheap. But, reverting to fusion, what about the poor old politicians who have to decide whether to bung a few more billion at fusion research? No chance of getting it right at all.
The TLS also tells of another interesting endeavour, namely the publication of the correspondance of one Sir Joseph Banks. He must have been a very busy chap because this installment runs to seven volumes and 3500 pages with the promise of more to come. First thought was, what a terrible waste of energy. What can possibly be so interesting about an 18th century botanist? Is it really so important what he wrote about magnolias? Who is paying for all this stuff? But then, I notice that the interesting endeavour is being undertaken by Pickering and Chatto (http://www.pickeringchatto.com/), once of Pall Mall but perhaps now of Bloomsbury Way. As far as I know they have not been nationalised and they do need to turn a pound. But then one thinks that the pound they turn must be virtually all generated by the academic libraries who hoover up one copy apeice of everything they produce. 1,400 universities in the US, 2,300 in India and 21,789 in China would make for a respectable print run. Although it may be that the Chinese have not signed up to the appropriate copyright agreement and only buy a single copy for reproduction nearer home. But, for books of this sort, a print run of 3,701 might be quite respectable. And that is not counting the 132 universities in this country. My point being that this is all public money. So while Pickering and Chatto might look like a private sector operation, they are a fully integrated part of a scam by university librarians to extract money from the world's taxpayers. I'm sure the late P. Larkin would have heartily approved.
# posted by Jim @ 1:08 AM 
